Peter SARKISIAN
Summary
Peter Sarkisian is an American new-media artist whose work combines video projection and sculpture to create a hybrid form of multi-media installation.
Sarkisian studied photography and film at the California Institute of the Arts and the American Film Institute in the late 1980’s, and then began working with video as a sculptural element in the mid 90’s. The underlying premise of his work remains committed to using video as an instrument against commercialized media, namely television, in order to transform the act of watching video from an experience-killing endeavor to an experience-creating one. He accomplishes this by joining sculptural elements with projected video imagery to create audio/visual illusions that trap the viewer between conflicting interpretations, thereby forcing a state of self-awareness that is otherwise absent while watching television.
Named a Master Video Artist in 2007 by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Sarkisian has exhibited widely throughout the world in major museums and public venues, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Musée Picasso, France, the Hammer Museum of Art, the Albright-knox Art Gallery and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Sarkisian's work has been featured in many international exhibitions and festivals, including the Istanbul Biennial in Turkey, the Vidarte Festival in Mexico City, the Whitney Biennial in New York, and the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland.
In 2008 the University of Wyoming Art Museum organized an extensive mid-career retrospective of Sarkisian’s work. The exhibition traveled to numerous venues throughout the world, including the Knoxville Museum of Art, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.
In April of 2014, The Orange County Museum of Art opened it's own retrospective exhibition of Sarkisian's work, curated by Dan Cameron.
Press
Peter SARKISIAN
Press Release: VideoMorphic Figures
2019-07-05
